Spain urgently needs an internationally credible science policy

Last week we republished in English an
open farewell letter from a departing Spanish scientist to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy that had generated a huge response in both the old and new media. Here, the author of that letter,
Amaya Moro-Martín, describes how cuts and delays are compounding long-standing bureaucratic problems to damage the viability and international credibility of the Spanish science system.

Spain urgently needs an internationally credible science policy

Last week we republished in English an
open farewell letter from a departing Spanish scientist to Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy that had generated a huge response in both the old and new media. Here, the author of that letter,
Amaya Moro-Martín, describes how cuts and delays are compounding long-standing bureaucratic problems to damage the viability and international credibility of the Spanish science system.

Amaya Moro-Martín

Tuesday 10 September 2013 07.22 EDT
First published on Tuesday 10 September 2013 07.22 EDT

While the Spanish government claims that "a considerable effort" has been made to maintain public investment, real spending on R&D in Spain has fallen cumulatively 33.1% during this administration (45.7% since 2009), placing our country well below the EU-27 average in terms of percentage of GDP. To disguise drastic cuts in the public research sector, year after year the government has increased the funds nominally available as R&D credits to firms. But those are credits, not grants, and are rarely requested by a private sector that has largely lost interest in R&D. Recurrent budget cuts are undermining the entire public research system. The 2013 call of the national research grants programme should have appeared last December but is still awaited. Even if it were published in the next few weeks, the time required to review the proposals suggests that the effect will be a gap in funding coverage of more than one year. Additional concerns relate to the sudden shift away from bottom-up grant funding to a top-down approach (which didn't exist in 2012 but which now accounts for two-thirds of the total budget) and a strong shift in emphasis towards favoring research projects with short-term market impacts.

Even where grants have been approved, it is not clear when research groups can expect to receive the funding. For the 2012 call, there was a seven-month delay before funds finally arrived. Then, in an Official Bulletin of the State, the government stunned the community by announcing that the three-year grants which had been awarded would be extended by a year, without providing any further funding for that fourth year.

If that were not enough, the Treasury blocked the transfer of funds approved by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (in charge of R&D since the Ministry of Science was dismantled by the government) to research groups working at universities in the many autonomous regions whose governments have not yet fulfilled deficit reduction goals. These decisions were later reversed, but the uncertainty has forced many researchers to halt their work for more than half a year.

Nobody at the ministry will guarantee that this chaotic situation will not be repeated again for the 2013 call of proposals (when it finally comes out), adding research to the list of high-risk sports. The ministry blames the Treasury for this mess – it is almost as if the Spanish government is deliberately sabotaging its own science policy.

Permanent positions at research institutes and universities are being lost to the system. The Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is only replacing 3% of retiring staff. Programmes for early career researchers have also suffered, the CSIC one disappearing entirely and the Juan de la Cierva and tenure-track Ramón y Cajal fellowships being reduced by 30% and accumulating delays, again resulting in a gap of more than one year in funding. Because the salaries of many Ph.D. students, post-docs and technicians depend on these funding streams, these delays, compounded by the usual bureaucratic hurdles in the recruitment process, have forced an unknown number of researchers to work for extended periods without pay; an interesting way to increase the level of volunteering among young people.

The effect of these cuts and delays is to amplify existing structural problems with research careers in Spain, so that more and more researchers are forced to contemplate emigration or a career change – in sharp contrast to the government's assertion that the "brain drain" is an unjustified cliché. It is often asked how much it has cost the taxpayers to train all these researchers that emigrate; but the more relevant question might be about the likely social cost of failing to renew Spain's ageing population of researchers (the average age of a researcher in a permanent position being about 55).

Cuts and uncertainty are affecting institutions as well as careers. CSIC, with 135 institutes, is an emblematic case, accounting as it does for 20% of the scientific activity of Spain. CSIC has spent 2013 on the threat of bankruptcy. The government continues to promise that it will not be allowed to collapse. However it has only transferred to CSIC €25m out of the €100m needed to balance the budget (though it has promised to transfer a further €50m at some point).

It was predicted CSIC would run out of cash by May this year but this was delayed to October, thanks to unprecedented austerity measures (taking all the accumulated reserves of CSIC research institutes up to 2012, intended to be invested in research, and using them to pay the bills). Nonetheless some institutes were forced to close for two weeks in August because they could not cover the cost of utilities. The government has just agreed to advance the transfer of €44m worth of grant funding that was meant to pay for research activities during 2014 but which will end up paying utilities in late 2013, delaying the bankruptcy a few more months but not resolving the problem. If anything, researchers are developing a taste for suspense. CSIC will likely be saved at the last minute, but the negative impact on its research activities, its ability to participate in international collaborations and the damage to its credibility are undeniable.

Expecting institutions to survive this kind of standstill intact is like asking someone to stop breathing for an hour. And indeed many researchers have stopped breathing: CSIC has lost some 1,200 science jobs (permanent and non-permanent) in 2012 and may have lost an additional 1,000 by the end of 2013, amounting to a 20% decrease in the research workforce in two years. Either there is a 'brain drain' or researchers just sublimate.

Luis de Guindos, the economy minister, has just announced that the R&D budget will grow in 2014. His statement has been received with extreme caution, maybe because in 2013 he argued that the budget had increased by 5% when in reality it was slashed by 13.7%. Researchers do not forgive manipulated data, nor do they tolerate ignoring the data: the minister's recently approved Strategy for Science, Technology and Innovation for 2013-20 fails to mention the drastic budget cuts of the last few years, makes no assessment of their impact and does not specify what human and financial resources will be available in the short and medium-term future. The Government hopes to increase our return from the EU Framework Programmes in order to compensate for domestic cuts, but European funding is designed to build on a solid national funding base, not to replace it.

Spain urgently needs a credible science policy. There must be an end to the historic cycle of boom and bust in research spending, and R&D spending should be restored to the level of the 2009 budget to converge with Europe. But it is not a question of maintaining the status quo – increased investment should come hand in hand with reform.

Coordination in government, and between the government and the regional governments, must be improved. Bureaucracy at all levels and in all research-related administrative processes must be minimized. Timelines should be honoured and allocated funds spent. Much of this could be facilitated by finally creating the National Research Agency and guaranteeing it the resources and autonomy to operate a multi-year funding cycle. The government did allow for its creation, but with zero budget! And it would be good to see the return of the Ministry of Education and Science.

Increased autonomy should be accompanied by increased accountability. All institutes and groups in receipt of public funding should undergo rigorous evaluations, incentivising excellent research. These evaluations should be done according to the same criteria nationwide, regardless of whether the funding comes from the State or the region.

Permanent recruitment in the public research sector urgently needs to be revived to renew the ageing researcher population. The tenure commitment of the "tenure-track" Ramón y Cajal programme should be honoured. Greater mobility of researchers from institute to institute, between the institute sector and the university sector, and into the system from abroad, is required in order to combat inbreeding and raise the international credibility and competitiveness of the Spanish system.

Some of these changes will require significant legislative efforts. The coherence of such reforms could be aided by re-establishing a Science Commission in the Spanish Congress and Senate. An advisory Science Council with strong representation from the scientific community (on the German model, for example) should have a leading role in steering the reforms and advising on science policy.

The second Open Letter for Science ended up taped to the closed gates of the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness. The lukewarm reception of this document, backed by the Confederation of Spanish Scientific Societies, the Conference of University Chancellors, a wide range of grassroots scientific organization and the two major trade unions, was a powerful image of the indifference for science and for the research community of the government. This should never happen again. The government should go beyond photo-opportunities and make a real commitment to a sector that can help Spain to make its economy less vulnerable. Otherwise, our political leaders will be boycotting the future of our country.

Amaya Moro-Martín is a Ramón y Cajal researcher at the Spanish National Research Council and spokesperson of the grassroots movement Investigación Digna. She is about to return to the US to work at Nasa. Her original letter to Mariano Rajoy can be found here.